Chapter One

Summer

Thirty years ago

Jack Nash decides, at midnight on a Wednesday in the dead of summer
in Los Angeles, that his daughter Hazel is ready for The Story.

He was six years old when his father first told him The Story. That’s
Hazel’s age now—exactly six—and she’s wide awake, forever asking why
and what: Why does she need to go to sleep? What are dreams? Why do
people die? What happens after people die?

“You’ll know when it happens,” Jack tells her.

Six is the appropriate age, Jack thinks.

Five years old was too young. Five is how old his son Skip was when
Jack told him The Story and it hadn’t stuck, didn’t seem to make any
impression whatsoever. Which got Jack wondering: How old do you have to
be to retain an event for the rest of your life? That was the thing
about memory: After a certain point, you just knew something. How you
came to know it didn’t matter.

Hazel sits up on an elbow. “I won’t be scared,” she says solemnly.
Jack knows it’s true: Nothing scares Hazel. Not when she can learn
something. She’s the kind of child who would burn her right thumb on a
hot stove, then come back the next day and burn her left in order to
compare.

In an odd way, it made Jack proud. Hazel’s brother Skip wouldn’t
touch the stove in the first place, always so cautious of everything.
But Hazel was willing to give up a little skin for adventure.

“It begins with a mystery, a riddle,” Jack says, and he can hear his
father’s voice, his father’s words, so clearly. Dad’s been gone five
years now, but the memory of his last days is so vivid, it could have
been thirty minutes ago. “If you figure the riddle out, you can stay up
all night. If you can’t, you need to go to sleep. Deal?”

“Deal,” Hazel says.

“Close your eyes while I tell it to you,” Jack says, slipping into
The Voice, the same one his own dad used to use, the one Jack now uses
on his TV show, where every week he explores the world’s most famous
conspiracies: Who killed JFK? Why did FDR have a secret fraternity known
as The Room? Or his favorite during sweeps: Outside of every Freemason
meeting, there’s a chair known as the Tyler’s Chair; what are its true
origins and secrets?

It’s a show Hazel isn’t allowed to watch. Jack’s wife Claire worries
the show will give Hazel bad dreams. But Jack knows that Hazel revels in
nightmares, just like Jack used to: Something chasing you in your sleep
was always far more interesting than fields of cotton candy.
“This story begins a hundred and fifty years ago, with a farmer,” Jack
says as Hazel leans farther forward on her elbow. “The farmer woke up
early one morning to tend his fields, and a few yards from his house, he
found a young man on the ground, frozen to death.”

Hazel was fascinated by freezing—Jack and Claire constantly found
random objects in the freezer, everything from dolls to plants to dead
spiders.

“The farmer takes the body inside his farmhouse, puts a blanket on
him to thaw him out, then goes and rouses the town doctor, bringing him
back to look at the poor chap.

“When the doctor gets the dead man back to his office, he begins a
basic autopsy. He’s trying to find some identifying details to report to
the mayor’s office. But as he cuts open the man’s chest, he makes a
surprising discovery . . .” And here, Jack does the same thing his own
father did, and gives Hazel two brisk taps on the center of her
breastbone, gives her a real sense of the space involved. “Right there,
on the sternum and on the outside of his rib cage, he finds a small
object the size of a deck of cards. It’s encased in sealing wax. And as
he cracks the wax open, he finds a miniature book.”

Jack stays with her another ten minutes, then heads to his own
bedroom, where Claire is up, reading. “Did you get her to sleep?” Claire
asks.

“No,” Jack says. “I gave her a riddle.”

“Oh, Jack,” Claire says, “you didn’t.”

* * *

Hazel waits until she can hear her father and mother talking down the hall before she opens her eyes.

She gets up, walks across her room, opens the closet where she keeps
her stuffed animals. The fact is, she doesn’t really care for stuffed
animals, thinks they’re kind of creepy when you examine them closely:
animals with smiles and fake shines in their eyes, no teeth, no real
claws either. She quickly finds Paddington Bear, undresses him from his
odd blue rain slicker, fishes out a pair of scissors from her desk, and
then, very calmly, cuts open Paddington’s chest.

Inside is nothing but fuzz, white and clumpy. It’s nothing like how
she imagines a body will be, but that doesn’t matter. She pulls out all
of the stuffing, leaves it in an orderly bunch on her bedroom floor, and
then fills Paddington’s empty cavity with a Choose Your Own Adventure
paperback, the one where you pretended to be a spy, but where you mostly
ended up getting run over by trucks. She then packs the bear back up
with stuffing, staples his fur back together, makes Paddington look
smooth and new and lovable, then puts his jacket back on. Adjusts his
red cap.

Hazel then tiptoes out to the kitchen, finds the stepladder, and
slides it in front of the freezer. As she climbs up and examines the few
packages of frozen food, she decides Paddington would be best served
back behind the old flank steak that’s been in the icebox for nine
months now.

When her father asks her how the hell Paddington Bear ended up in the
freezer, disemboweled and filled with a book, she’ll give him her
answer. It’s impossible, she’ll say.

Nothing is impossible, her father will say, because he is a man of belief.
Then it must have been magic, she’ll say.

There’s no magic, he’ll say.

Then it must have been a person, trying to fool you, she’ll say.
And she will be right.